You’ve published several horror works— Bleak Houses , which is two novellas; the novel  Harrowgate  (blurbed by Lemony Snickett!),  Halloween Beyond: Gentleman’s Suit , and now you have  The Collective  coming out—and I know I’m missing somethings here. Can you talk a little about your writing journey?

I never know where I’m writing from ‘til I’m in it, sometimes when I finish! Harrowgate was set in New York, as that was the city I grew up with. I was writing from a very specific place of loss and made a story of a man whose wife and kid were dead and living with him. I thought I was writing a love story, so didn’t know it was horror until it sold as a horror novel! Then I was like, oh yeah, dead people, a demon-type doula, I guess it is horror! Boy am I glad it was--it opened up a thriving, supportive community for me.

I adore horror writers! Since then, I’ve been writing in horror, science fiction, and nongenre, whatever the story demands. I thought another book I was writing would be magic realism, but it ended up straight realism. Started another book in realism that ended up horror. To answer your question, I guess the journey has just been write forward. And there are happy surprises along the way. Like ending up at Raw Dog Screaming Press with Bleak Houses which is how I met you! Through some work in the LA writing community, I met the good folks at Writ Large and now they’re publishing The Collective!

I freaking loved  Safer , the first novella in  Bleak Houses , which dealt with a nanny working for an unbelievably famous LA family in the middle of the pandemic. Your new novel,  The Collective , also deals with Hollywood. Do both come from your own experiences in LA?

I’m setting most things in LA now because it’s such a layered and rich city. I’ve lived here thirty years, and I am still baffled by outside people’s view of it as a subsection of inhabitants who live in a five-mile radius, most of them transplants. I’m always trying to dig deeper, show a lot of neighborhoods. I’m working on stories now in a slightly magical LA that show the history of displacement and neighborhoods here.

You have a new novel coming out— The Collective , which is publishing with non-horror press. I freaking loved it. What do you want readers to know about it?

Thank you for reading it! Despite what I said above, I DID work in the film industry for fifteen plus years and saw some stuff. No actual demons. But I was most interested in film industry folks’ constant search for status and something MORE and everything in place to feed that. The Collective is, if you will, your ticket behind the velvet rope, into the inner workings of production companies, actors, auditioning and the movers and shakers of Hollywood. Only with demons. It’s fun!

That said there are long hard looks at recognizing systems you live in, and how they might help or harm the larger ecosystem. It’s also a look at racism in Hollywood, and learning when you aren’t helping yourself but something larger and maybe more unsavory. I had fun writing it, I hope folks have fun reading it!

You tell parts of  The Collective  from the perspectives of Jonathan and Curtis, both Black men—and their social positioning as Black men is an important part of the novel. As someone who writes Southern Gothic, race is always on my mind, so can you talk a little bit about how you negotiated that space?

I worked in Hollywood largely in the nineties and it was completely white dude dominated. I had friends of color being treated worse than I was as a white woman—and trust me, I have stories there. I was working at the time of Weinstein. But you can’t show racism in all of its subtleties without characters of color.

I included the story of my friend Damon who was waiting for his car at the valet at a restaurant. A white executive handed him his keys as he rushed into lunch. Damon was there in a nice suit, the VP of production for a major production company, feeling chuffed about a movie he was putting together, and this was the presumption about him. It stuck with me.

I took Jonathan’s story as an executive for a “color blind” white executive to explore the more subtle dangers of working for someone who claims not to see color (Simon is a demon, so race is not important to him) to explore how even when you’re in, you’re not fully in. And how white people claiming to be championing people of color can be their own kind of danger.

Curtis is also Black because the friendship/mentorship between him and Jonathan seemed most important to the story. But the story between Jonathan and Simon is more about the dangers of loving and putting one’s faith in a narcissist. And Simon not “seeing” color is another way of exploring Simon’s not seeing Jonathan at all. I dug into that specific kind of heartbreak, when you put your belief in someone and your support behind someone because you think they see you, only to realize they are functioning from their own operational reality which has nothing to do with you at all. The power dynamics in this supposedly progressive space are still white supremacist and this story pushes at that in its own way.

Casting couch tropes and the whole Weinstein thing had been done to death, and I guess I was writing from a hopeful space where that maybe has passed in the film industry? I wanted Sophia’s space to step outside those power dynamics (although there are some questions around sex) into different questions about working within a system and slowly waking up to it.

I also found  The Collective  interesting for its emphasis on setting—non-Angelenos don’t often think about LA as a place as much as a concept. What led you to emphasize setting so much?

Yes! Again, many notions of this city are created by a very small demographic of transplants who work in film. I wanted to capture downtown LA in its layers of displacement, the natural beauty of the city and it surrounding hills, and this entire world going on outside the film industry, even though the story centers on the industry itself.

You have an interesting distribution plan in place for The Collective. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Yes! Writ Large Press, who are always looking at publishing in new and interesting ways, has released the book as a serial. For ten bucks, folks can subscribe to the book as a newsletter, and get new installments every week for thirteen weeks! The physical book comes out later this year (I believe at a discount for those who’ve subscribed). It may also be released as a podcast somewhere down the road.

I teach writing and I’m trying to educate my students about the many different ways in which you can get your words to people. Writ Large is exploring all those ways. I’m excited to see how this goes and report back to my students. There are so many models outside of traditional publishing now, and so many kinds of readers, I’m looking forward to this.

I’m so excited about this book for you. And I know you have a whole team of cheerleaders behind you—Women Who Submit. Who are they and what do they do?

Women Who Submit is an amazing organization founded by fellow graduates of Antioch University’s MFA program. I’ve been a proud member of their board for two years now, but a member since its inception. “Women Who Submit seeks to empower women and nonbinary writers by creating physical and virtual spaces for sharing information, supporting and encouraging submissions to literary journals, and clarifying the submission and publication process.” Basically we create support systems, share resources, and support women writers in our area. There are dozens of chapters all around the country now and the best thing about it is it’s grassroots and completely free to members.

We became a nonprofit last year, with the aim of raising money to continue programming for our members (being able to pay presenters is a big deal), including conferences and workshops. There are also grants available to members who apply including The Kit Reed Travel fund, that I created with my brothers in honor of my mom, who was always contributing to writer friends trying to get to writing residencies. Most people don’t understand that residencies, even funded, can be a barrier for folks who can’t afford to pay to travel to them. The Travel Fund is an attempt to close that gap.

I’m grateful to the members of Women Who Submit, because I always have someone to turn to to brainstorm ideas for how to promote a book, get the word out, or even, after yesterday’s workshop, how to get books into libraries! We had a panel of librarians from universities, to public libraries, to a grammar school talk about different resources for getting onto library programming or getting books into libraries.

Thanks so much to Kate Maruyama for talking to me about her new novel! You can pick the installments of The Collective at Writ Large.

Working for a demon is complicated and in his late fifties, Jonathan Hawkins is fighting the waning of his career in ageist, racist Hollywood and is working hard to maintain his relevance in the industry. As Simon Raithe’s devoted right-hand man, producer, and partner of several decades, he named and built the Collective. Jonathan is behind its language, genius, and silenced evil doings.

Still reeling from her mom’s sudden death from cancer, Jenny, 26, has blown off admission to med school and moved to Hollywood to pursue a lifelong dream of acting. When she falls in with the Collective everything begins to change. She becomes an assistant to the charismatic, yet elusive Simon Raithe. As she starts getting auditions, and invitations to exclusive parties, she puts aside any misgivings she may have about secret meetings, and parts of her life into which the Collective seems to seep.

Curtis is intrigued by his weekly dinners at Musso & Frank’s with Simon and his mentor, Jonathan, and decides to write a book on them: the real power in Hollywood, the unpinnable, ineffable Simon Raithe. But as he begins his research, their stories reveal holes and dark spots including the mysterious disappearance of an old friend. He has no choice but to dig further. What he uncovers could topple the entire organization.

Maruyama weaves a tale of intrigue, evil, and stardust as she takes you behind the velvet ropes of the film industry into its darkest recesses.

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